Tag Archives XNA

Free Game Assets 12; User Interface Themes

We’ve been a little overworked as of late with the horror that is real life, but we’ve found some time to put together a few more assets for XNA / iPhone / Flash Game Developers. We’re thinking of starting to have ‘themed months’ for our giveaways, as we’ve come to realise that we’re just kind ...

Free Game Assets 02; Sprites for Particle Effects

Another Tuesday and another selection of free assets for our readers to enjoy. While there are countless tutorials on putting together an efficient particle system in a number of programming languages, the core of the particle effects you’ll enjoy in your game requires sprites. We’re offering up a selection of sprites that you can use in your very own particle systems in your XNA (or any other) independent game.

Ikaroids; Now Available on the Xbox Live Marketplace!

Our first Xbox Live Indie Games title ‘Ikaroids’ is now available on the Xbox Live Marketplace! Ikaroids is an action packed twin-stick arcade style shooter wtih a unique physics and game engine that encourages you to use parts of the scenary in a defensive manner while avoiding devastating collisions with the asteroids. The main campaign ...

Free Music for Independent Game Developers 01

Here at Iron Star Media Ltd. we still very much learning the ropes when it comes to generating assets for our games. However, we’re in the fortunate position in that we’ve had a reasonable amount of experience playing around with Photoshop and Garageband in our spare time.

This post marks the first release of free assets that we would like to release to the community to help other independent developers who need assets for their games.

5 things to avoid in XNA/Indie games

In this post I’m going to talk about five of the things I have a powerful dislike for in commercial games. Of course, needless to say, this is just my opinion, but these are the things that I’d like to see a lot less of in games in general.

Sentinel Development Diary 2 / Getting Game on Screen

With the overall menus in place and a solid roadmap of the development ahead of us, the second proper session of development on our latest XNA title Sentinel sees the addition of the main game screen and the player entities. I’m going to talk about some of things that we did on this day, and the differences we made between this game and Ikaroids.

Read more

A Note About Game Difficulty in XNA Games

After the second round of playtesting for Ikaroids, we found that a number of comments were coming back to us stating that the game was rather difficult. Instead of simply dumbing down the game, we added the classic Easy, Medium and Hard difficulty settings to the game. Here’s some discussion about how we did that, and how to pre-empt the playtesters comments!

Read more

Planning Code for Game Development (XNA)

There is nothing more detrimental to quick progress than poor planning. We’ve all had times when partaking in a project where we get confused and lost, or we’re coding away without any real purpose. I find this often simply comes down to not really knowing what the final goal of a class, project or function really is. If we can sit back, look at an overview and understand just what it is that we’re aiming for – a lot of coding becomes plugging in the gaps. I’m going to show you the general programming overview of Ikaroids to help you plan your project. You may develop your game in a completely different way – and this way is neither perfect or the definitive way to do it, this is just an example of how we did it to give you some ideas.

Sentinel Development Diary 1 / Planning, Concepts and Initial Work

This is the first proper entry in the Development Diary for our latest XNA Independent Game entitled Sentinel. Iron Star Media consists of two developers; John Wordsworth (@johnwordsworth) – a programmer and lightweight artist, and Jackson Matthews (@oliacym) – a heavyweight artist and designer. This series of blog posts will show you how we made our second game and will hopefully shed some insight into the overall procedures behind game development as well as giving some tips based on the lessons we learnt. 

Today we document the first 5 hours of development with some planning, concepts and basic ground work.

Read more

XNA: The title-safe area and SDTVs

In this article we discuss the trials of working to the title-safe area in your own Independent XNA titles. We look at the problems that this can raise and possible solutions that you should consider right from the start of the project.

On face value, working to ensure that the contents of your console / XNA title fit may sound like a trivial task. However, we have learnt our lesson well, and after our first project – we have come to realise that it’s something that you have to consider right from the beginning. Not everyone has a 42 inch 1080p screen like you might, and making sure your game works across all types of displays can cause a real headache if left to the last minute.